I used these meshes as proxy object to grow hair. Then, I applied the Hair and Fur modifier, and combined hairs until I got the result I wanted (Fig.31).


The hair was pretty easy to style, as this man has short hair and is partially bald.

To render the hair, I used mental ray and simple spot lights. I also rendered the hair in a whole new scene and composed the result with my character render.

To make the lights from the hair scene, I matched the lights from the render, imported (merged) those lights, and then created simple spots and aligned them to the original lights. I did the same for the camera, so I was absolutely sure it was all accurate.

To render the hair with mental ray, I used the mrprim (Fig.32).



When doing this you can either use the default material of the Hair and Fur modifier, or use a mental ray material, with a hair map plugged in the surface channel. I personally like to use the shader_p Hair_TK pack (Fig.33).